In a large scale distributed print spooler system, large number of printers, e.g., thousands of printers, may be connected to a print server configured to control these printers. The print server may also be connected to a large number of computers, e.g., personal computers, with software applications, e.g., word processing, that transmit print requests to the print server to print documents. Typically, the print server includes software, commonly referred to as a “print spooler,” that manages the printing of the received print images.
In a large scale distributed print spooler system, the print server may not be able to discover the addition of printers to the network. Consequently, when printers are added in a large scale distributed print spooler system, the attributes of the added printer may have to be manually added to a database, commonly referred to as a print spooler database, in the print server. Some examples of printer attributes may include the type of printer, the location of the printer, text printing attributes, raster printing attributes, vector printing attributes, command attributes, feature attributes, and option attributes. Manually adding the printer attributes of a significant number of printers may be time consuming and prone to errors.
In some print spooler systems, the print server may be able to locate printers connected to the print server using a specific, not widely available, protocol such as Service Location Protocol (SLP), Service Support Transfer Protocol (SSTP) or RVP (RendezVous Protocol). However, in a large distributed print spooler system, using such protocols may not be practical in locating printers connected to the print server as each printer may respond to different specific protocols.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to locate printers in a large scale distributed print spooler system using a widely available protocol, e.g., HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), and automatically adding the printer (printer attributes) to the print spooler database.